"I can't go to Church till red cardinals come back (and may they be of exactly that red), nor to Court till trumpets and banners come back--nor to evening parties till the dances are like that dance. What a lovely young Queen has been found. But there was no you.... Perhaps it was as well. I couldn't have you slighted even in a play, and put aside. When I go back to see you as I soon will, it will be easier. Mr. Irving let me know you would not act; and proposed that I should go later on--wasn't that like him? So I sat with my children and was right happy, and as usual the streets looked dirty and all the people muddy and black as we came away. Please not to answer this stuff. "Ever yours aff'ly, "E. B. J. "I wish that Cardinal could have been made Pope, and sat with his foot on the Earl of Surrey's neck. Also I wish to be a Cardinal, but then I sometimes want to be a pirate. We can't have all we want. "Your boy was very kind--I thought the race of young men who are polite and attentive to old fading ones had passed away with antique pageants--but it isn't so." When the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire gave the famous fancy-dress ball at Devonshire House, they attended it in the robes which had appealed so strongly to Burne-Jones's imaginative eye. I was told by one who was present at this ball that, as the Cardinal swept up the staircase, his long train held magnificently over his arm, a sudden wave of reality seemed to sweep upstairs with him, and reduce to the pettiest make-believe all the aristocratic masquerade that surrounded him. I renewed my acquaintance with "Henry VIII" in 1902, when I played Queen Katherine for Mr. Benson during the Shakespeare Memorial performances in April. I was pretty miserable at the time--the Lyceum reign was dying, and taking an unconscionably long time about it, which made the position all the more difficult. Henry Irving was reviving "Faust"--a wise step, as it had been his biggest "money-maker"--and it was a question whether I could play Margaret. There are some young parts that the actress can still play when she is no longer young: Beatrice, Portia, and many others come to mind. But I think that when the character is that of a young girl, the betrayal of whose innocence is the main theme of the play, no amount of skill on the part of the actress can make up for the loss of youth. Suggestions were thrown out to me (not by Henry Irving, but by others concerned) that, although I was too old for Margaret, I might play _Martha_! Well! well! I didn't quite see _that_. So I redeemed a promise given in jest at the Lyceum to Frank Benson twenty years earlier, and went off to Stratford-upon-Avon to play in "Henry VIII." I played Katherine on Shakespeare's Birthday--such a lovely day, bright and sunny and warm. The performance went finely--and I made a little speech afterwards which was quite a success.